When Botanix announced last week that it would be winding down operations, the Bitcoin layer-2 project did not try to sugarcoat its message. "It did not work," the team wrote in a social media post announcing the shut down. "At least not in this market and not in this timeline." Botanix was one of a number of projects pitching Bitcoin as a new frontier for decentralized finance (DeFi), staking, zero-knowledge rollups and smart-contract applications.